Avnet program aims to simplify complex designs

SANTA CLARA, Calif.  Avnet Design Services, the engineering branch of distributor Avnet Inc., announced a partnership program Wednesday (Jan. 30) aimed at speeding the development of board-level systems and system-on-chip designs.

The company's Avalon Reference Design System program involves backplane designs, add-in cards, hardware intellectual property, firmware, application code and tools intended to create a plug-and-play design environment across a range of important embedded, communications and networking applications. Avnet will support the program with development tools, design services, testing, contract manufacturing and training.

Partners in the program include AMD, Atmel, Bourns, Celoxica, Cypress Semiconductor, Dallas Semiconductor, Denali Software, Infineon, Micron, Motorola Semiconductor, National Semiconductor, Philips Semiconductors, and Xilinx, among others. Partners have provide components that can be plugged together to form platforms for rapid development.

"The problem with traditional reference designs is that all the choices of vendors and components are made for you in one big monolithic design," said Avnet vice president of marketing Warren Miller. "But design teams need modularity so they can pick just the right components for their application."

For example, Avnet said a user of the Avalon program might plug together a Xilinx Virtex-E development board and Virtex-II adapter card, a PCI add-in card, MicroBlaze IP implemented on yet another add-in card, driver firmware, Vmetro debug utilities and an Internet application.

Ron Wilson is editorial director of Integrated System Design, a sister publication of EE Times.